Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll: How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens

You take a holiday. He/she malingers. I have gone on sabbatical.

And when I had embraced and kissed her on her first day at work and my first day at home, when I had handed over the delicious freshly prepared packed lunch, when I had waved through the window at her getting into the car, and then at the back of the car, and then at the side of the car as it turned right out of the gate towards the village, and then just the empty street in general, I took one step back, shrugged my shoulders and wondered what the fuck to do with the rest of my life.

‘Sabbatical’. I was young, I was brainy, I was enthusiastic and I had my whole life ahead of me. This would not just be a new personal dawn; it would be a new personal big bang. A million opportunities, a billion things to do, a trillion chances to do something really special with my life that morning. My time to plan and achieve some things that other men my age could only dream of, stuck in their city-centric nine-to-five drudge routines, prodding away at a keyboard whilst in glass offices, floors and floors above them, faceless managers formulated Strategic HR Initiatives.

I sat down and watched Bargain Hunt.

I really don’t watch a lot of television – I’ve got so much else to do. A bit of the daytime stuff, the news, Prime Minister’s Question Time, very occasionally Countdown. Now it’s the season, I’m looking forward to Barry Hearn’s bowls coverage; the cricket will be on Sky and there are often bands playing on Sky Arts – even if I’m not into the music in question, I like to watch these for professional reasons, to pick up some tips. Repeats of Crown Court are always interesting. But I ration myself carefully – you can waste your life on such stuff. Eggheads is fun as well.

Bargain Hunt is my favourite. I think the thing that I like most about it is the sheer good-naturedness of it. Amiable people accompany amiable presenters around amiable antiques fairs. The amiable winning team is thrilled to walk away with a twelve pound profit; they give big, amiable, enthusiastic hugs to the losers, who are in the red for the sum of two pounds. The presenter wraps it up with an amiable bad joke and the whole thing will be on again tomorrow, just with different people, unless they cannot find any different people in which case they will use the same ones and nobody will notice.

There is a lot to say for good-natured, undemanding television. It is as heart-warming as good-natured, undemanding music is bland. I don’t know why this should be the case. Why should the amiable people on Bargain Hunt make you feel all warm and comfortable and pleased that they’ve done well, when listening to the equivalent sort of music – say, Dido – make you want to kill people with an axe?

I have a theory about this; a theory upon which I have been working for some time and which I think contains a germ of profundity.

That is, when the television is on, people have to focus on it. Accordingly, they get drawn in to the exclusion of all else; watching happy people on undemanding programmes causes viewers to project the scenes on which they are concentrating into a vision of humanity as a whole. We do not resent the mindless friendliness or the clunking set-ups because we know deep down that, whilst an artificial reality, it is a version of reality that might well be better than our own. Put simply, in the case of television, we see two or three amiable people on our screen and momentarily believe that all the world is like that. That is why it becomes reassuring rather than irritating.

Whereas Dido inserts secret messages into her audio recordings, telling you to kill people with an axe.

Lumped in with the antiques programmes are the cookery programmes and the property programmes, and the programmes about going on holiday, and the programmes about going on holiday to find a new property and sitting down for something to eat at the end. The shows are all interchangeable and formulaic, but very watchable. Kirstie Allsopp – the homely, comfortable long-term cottage prospect in the countryside against Sarah Beeny’s wham-bam crash pad in the city – is a particular favourite of mine. Her presenting skills give even the pokiest hovel the warm, welcoming feeling of a breast.

However, as you venture outside the antiques show community, the amiability becomes slightly forced; imperceptibly less genuine. And if you watch enough, sooner or later you will come across Max.

Max and his wife Becca are the subjects of much of the property-, holiday- or dinner-related content in the daytime hours. Stressed by their successful businesses in the City, they have a hankering to move to the countryside with their children, Harry (12) and Amelie (8), and a Labrador. The property must be a cosy olde-worlde period cottage in a very rural middle-of-nowhere setting, with all mod cons and good transport links.

Max is very tall, due to his successful business in the City, which is probably something to do with portfolios. None of the cosy olde-worlde period cottages with good transport links are quite right, as the ceilings are too low and the rooms are too small, or they are too close to a road. Becca is dead set on having large grounds around the property. These are partly for the use of Harry (12), Amelie (8) and the Labrador, but mainly because she has spotted a gap in the market and wants to set up a small studio in the old converted garage ‘for her art’. Then she will not have to be stressed by her own successful business in the City any more – which is probably something to do with recruitment consultancy – but will make an honest yeoperson’s living selling hand-crafted and beautifully-framed leaf images to a market hungry for such objets.

Max makes some compromises to get the place he wants. The presenter suggests that he can knock through from the dining room to the living room to increase the space available, making the house suitable for modern living and getting rid of all the nice-but-impractical olde bits. A Reliable Local Builder has provided a quote for this. Harry (12) and Amelie (8) are happy enough. They are hopeful of being given a quadbike, and it is fully four and eight years respectively before they discover that there are no jobs, no off-licences, and no places to meet people with whom they might have sexual intercourse but yet not be forced to enjoy a subsequent acquaintance. This causes them to move to the city and set up successful businesses, in portfolios or recruitment consultancy. The Labrador just goes with the flow.

There is a particular scene at the end of every Max-and-Becca programme. This is the ‘dinner party scene’. Max and Becca have thrown themselves into village life, and have been delighted to meet and befriend a group of solid village local types, all extremely happy as they are no longer stressed by their successful businesses in the City. We watch their perfect dinner party, with perfect jollity around a perfect country dining table. There is lots of complimenting Becca on her starter, and probably a toast. It is horrible.

I do not want to turn into Max. If there is one thing in my life that I do not want to be, it is Max. That is my aim in life – non-Maxism. It’s not much, but it is always good to have a goal.

The thing about chickens is that they are a connection to the land. My Auntie Miriam keeps chickens; she is a well-respected organic permaculture farmer and land expert living in the wild part of New Zealand. The chickens peck around her land, devouring grubs and other unwelcome pests. They give her eggs, and every now and again she wrings a neck and enjoys a delicious chicken dinner.

The LTLP has insisted that the chickens keep within a specific fenced-off point, and that should they be found pecking around her land (whether devouring grubs and other unwelcome pests or no) then it will not be their necks that will be wrung.

It is a collaborative project with Short Tony from next door. The chicken enclosure will start at the back of my garden, and then extend in a large ‘L’ shape behind my shed and onto his land. We shall share the eggs and the responsibility of husbandry. It is our first step towards setting up a self-sufficient commune for when society finally collapses in an implosion of racial violence, terrorist outrage and the totalitarian imposition of Strategic HR Initiatives.

Cleaning them out will not be the hardest thing I’ve done. I’ve been cleaning things out ever since day zero, ever since I came to Norfolk, ever since LTLP sent me to Tesco on the very first day of my sabbatical with an instruction to buy cleaning products.

Tesco in Norfolk is nothing like Tesco in North London. There are far fewer people; there is more space and a friendlier atmosphere; you are not worried that if you turn your back as you reach for a new carrier bag then somebody will artfully reach round and steal your Cathedral City. The checkout assistants wait patiently, looking eagerly for customers; they wave at you cheerfully if there is any danger of you having to queue. It is always good to support local retailers like this. And if I leave the house at the same time as the LTLP leaves for work, I can be in Tesco for eight o’clock and have the household shopping done by nine. That is the sort of time management skill that I have brought to my role from my previous successful career in the City, and why my sabbatical is a continuing success.

I am well known in Tesco these days, and always chat to the staff. There are the Eastern European guys who you sometimes find stacking the shelves, a nice chatty middle-aged lady on the tills who is new and just getting to grips with things, and the man with glasses who supports Spurs. A man on the tills! That is not even worthy of comment these days, thanks to Dawn French and her associates. People might criticise Tesco, but it has led the way. It is commendable. He packs at least as fast as the ladies, proving the dinosaurs hopelessly wrong.

Despite their enlightened social policies, I am, of course, aware of this well of criticism, and that Tesco verges on Evil Corporation status. Colin, whose family have farmed in the village since about 489 BC, stringently boycotts them due to their perceived shabby treatment of the farming community – and there is the very real problem of local shops and businesses being forced to close whenever a Tesco moves in nearby, despite the store’s protestations that its presence increases consumer choice. On a wider level, the ‘food miles’ issue is a serious one, the extra packaging used by supermarkets contributes to our landfill surplus, and the ‘big brand’ mentality is a key factor in the homogenisation of Britain. But you have to balance all these factors with the fact that you get points whenever you shop there.

Personally, I have a rule that governs my Tesco use – I try not to buy vegetables, as I can get nicer and better and more local and cheaper ones elsewhere, and for ethical reasons I don’t buy meat there, unless it is heavily reduced in price. Tins, frozen stuff, drinks, cereals – they are OK. And cleaning products. Cleaning products.

It is not as if I had never been in a supermarket before – it’s just that I could not remember ever having been in one on my own. On sabbatical day one I had no idea that I would eventually become close friends with the Eastern European Shelf Stackers, New Middle-Aged Lady, or Man With Glasses Who Supports Spurs, the Rosa Parks of the Tills. It was not my comfort zone at the time. The second sexual revolution was all very welcome and overdue, but you cannot overturn millennia of evolution in eighteen episodes of a thirty-minute situation comedy featuring a girl vicar.

I stared at my list.

‘Cleaning products,’ read the item.

‘Cleaning products.’ Cleaning products. This was typical. How was I supposed to know exactly what to buy? The rest of the list didn’t simply read ‘food’ and ‘drink’ – it was broken down properly, by item. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Low-sugar lemon squash.

‘Cleaning products.’ I noted with irritation that the list wasn’t even properly arranged. When you walk into a Tesco, the first thing you get to is the fruit and veg, and then, after you turn left and progress from aisle to aisle, there are the household items (including ‘cleaning products’), then general groceries, followed by the frozen stuff and, finally, soft drinks and alcohol. Therefore, that is the logical way to structure the shopping list. Yet ‘Branston Pickle’ was right at the bottom, ‘beer’ was in the middle, and salad items were sort of dotted all the way through. I made a note to talk to her about this. No wonder the CD collection was in such a state.

The cleaning products aisle was colourful and shiny and absolutely full of choices. I wandered up and down the planet Og, amazed and enthralled by the options available.

There were things that would clean wooden surfaces, and things that were good for stainless steel. Kitchen dirt was obviously different to bathroom dirt or living-room dirt, so there were different products for each of those rooms. There was special stuff for the windows, for the shower, for the inside of the dishwasher, for the oven, for wooden floors, for vinyl floors, for floors (unspecified), for those difficult-to-reach surfaces, for putting down the plughole to remove blockages, for putting down the plughole to remove stale odours, for putting down the toilet to remove both blockages and stale odours, and for ‘all general cleaning tasks’.

It was difficult to quell my panic. If I inadvertently effected a spillage of, say, coffee on the dining table, some would be likely to drip over onto the floor. I would then get it onto my hands, and need to wring a cloth out down the sink. Several products displayed a ‘helpline’ number, but I was not entirely convinced that their help would be truly impartial.

There were Cif cleaning products. There was Mr Muscle. There was Fairy and Domestos and Tesco’s Own and Weirdy Beardy Ecological Brand that doesn’t cause the creation of grotesquely mutated hybrid monsters in your toilet pipe. I realised that I had never bought a cleaning product before in my life. They all looked super, like they would get things really, really, really clean.

I swung my head from side to side, casting my eyes up and down the aisle. From what I have read in the magazines, if you look a bit lost and helpless when you are on your own in the cleaning products aisle of your local supermarket then an attractive divorcee/single mother will probably sidle up to you and start giving you advice, and before you can say ‘Bang! And the Dirt is Gone!’ you are having sex on her kitchen floor in the half-hour between dropping off for playgroup and morning yoga class. I swung my head and cast my eyes for ages and ages, but nothing whatsoever like this happened. Perhaps I looked too on top of things. That can intimidate women occasionally.

Being a countryman, what I really wanted was something that was very good for the environment. But this would need to be combined with a formula that I could just spray on and it would dissolve every single bit of dirt there, without me having to touch it with my fingers or do any scrubbing or wiping. I got a portfolio of Mr Muscle in the end, as it seemed to fit my lifestyle profile more than the Cif or the Fairy.

I was cleaning-products-upped; primed with detergent and ready to go.

My mobile phone bursts into life! I fumble in the pockets of my jeans as I survey the land intended for chickens. The name flashes at me from the dainty LCD display. It is Unlucky John.

‘Mate!’

‘Mate!’

‘Mate.’

‘How are you, mate?’

I grew up with Unlucky John. We went to the same school and then, when the time came, got jobs in the same sort of professional areas, in the same city, sharing the same sort of experiences that any young men do when they taste freedom for the first time. Of all the people in the world aside from the LTLP, I am probably closest to Unlucky John, which is why we try without fail to speak to each other on the telephone at least twice a year. That is the male way.

He’s never played bowls, but I was in a band with him once. To expand my musical horizons, I put together a group of local musicians, to play at birthday parties and other functions. Every serious musician should spend part of his life in this sort of outfit. You learn so much about songwriting and arranging by working out exactly how to play other people’s material to an audience, and it’s a good way of making you think about what an audience wants to hear and learning how to construct a coherent set list. We learnt ‘Hammer to Fall’ and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Deeply Dippy’. Covers bands also teach you discipline, and force you to adopt a professional attitude.

So Unlucky John became the singer and frontman of Brian Cant and the Flaps. He wasn’t actually a singer, and had never been a frontman, but none of the rest of us was either, and he was a friendly, popular chap, who we thought could work an audience. It was my birthday party coming up, and we were awarded that gig, after which bookings dried up. I wanted to persevere, but the others sort of drifted away to do other things – perhaps discipline and professionalism was not for them. Unlucky John had unfortunately got a bit pissed off that the dried peas had fallen out of the adapted plastic cup we’d given him for the shaky bits in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, so his enthusiasm had waned also.

It was their loss. Their musical projects elsewhere came to nothing in the big scheme of things, whereas I went on to support the Sultans of Ping. I wouldn’t gloat about my success if I saw the guys again – I’m a bigger man than that. And I don’t want to live in the past.